Thinking Like a Fun Social Nihilist

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The human social world is always in need in of a new, dynamic way of interpreting this crash-and-burn trajectory known as human life, which is why the worldwide clamor for the new, dynamic theory of all social reality now popularly known as Fun Social Nihilism (FSN) must be heeded. This is not hard work: imagine all the hitmakers of the 70s and 80s, the one-hit wonders and the major league talents, all fated to play their hits, one more damn time, once again for the crumbs of money needed to pay for the pool repair, the same old notes an wheezes that brilliantly lit up the Pop sky oh those many years ago. The similar hell would be if the purveyor of FSN had to endlessly type out the same paragraphs that wowed ’em back in The Supersystem days of the early 90s, trying to recapture that momentary hold on the cultural zeitgeist that has now gone with the winds of cultural change.

Yes, we US and A boomers have lived without the pandemics and the biological extinction events that were the lot of our unfortunate antecedents, but in order to think like a FSNer, you have to be willing to raise the spectacle of ineluctable social degradation, entropy, and misperformance. Sure, we got it good in oh so many ways, count ’em one by one if you’re so inclined to raise gratitude to an absurd pastime, but then there there are the interlocking crises that never seem to go away. William K. Black, an honest white collar prosecutor, was fighting the good fight against the banking terrorists of the Saving & Loan era, and he has continued to document their 2008 and beyond 3D mega-sequel of worldwide global corruption, extortion, fraud, and other evil whatnotting that marks the businessman type. Here’s how Black describes the current state of that world:

Not a single executive who led, and became exceptionally wealthy, by leading those epidemics has been imprisoned or even required to pay back the fraud proceeds.

Black describes the crimes that were committed: millions upon millions, of the most overt, consequential, and deleterious sort of outright felonies, and yet not one, that is ZERO regulatory response of apprehending a single one, or confiscating a single stolen dime. And Black is no young man, and neither are many of us: we know this is our world, we know that we have not one possible response by the supersystem to the enforced economic suffering visited upon the hundreds of millions, even billions of poor, by this sort of horror capitalism. Oh, wait, Black is not prepared to go that far: he cannot say that type of truth. Instead, we get his brand of specious social uplift after the bad news.

Consider how our system of near absolute impunity for elite white-collar financial criminals would be transformed if the American people – instead of the industry – were allowed to take “joint ownership” with the regulators (the regulatory “cops on the beat”) and the law enforcement community to restore the rule of law to Wall Street. That is one of the central changes that Bernie Sanders has been fighting to bring to America. Hillary Clinton could, and should, embrace that restoration of the rule of law.

Yeah, well, we get no points for specious social uplift (SSU) at the end of our exposes. Neither Sanders nor Black nor any team of pale white horses are going to even start the “restoration of the rule of law” in that established, institutional embodiment of capitalizer profit. How many times do we need to document the truth of Nowheresvilles coming to any of the arrant hopes of a better performing supersystem? Paint a house, grab a cold one, tend to your happy small world if you can, but let the prophets of reform go on their febrile vision quests without your assent.

Not one executive even indicted. Isn’t that some sort of eternal truth for the case of fun social nihilism? How much lower can you, the social observer, go without feeling the shit on the shitpile hit your ass?